Business Objects of San Jose, Calif. has developed a widely deployed relational database access system that uses semantically dynamic objects. The technology is known as the Business Objects semantic layer. The technology is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,555,403, which is incorporated herein by reference. The Business Objects semantic layer obviates the need for a user to master the various subtleties of existing query languages when writing database queries.
A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. A web service has an interface that is specified in a format such as the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). Other systems interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by the interface using messages, which may be enclosed in a container, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which is a protocol for exchanging eXtensible Markup Language (XML) messages over a computer network. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the web service stack, providing a basic messaging framework that more abstract layers can build on.
Web service messages are typically conveyed using the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) and normally comprise XML in conjunction with other Web-related standards. Software applications written in various programming languages and running on various platforms can use web services to exchange data over computer networks, such as the Internet.
It would be desirable to expand access to database semantic layers through web services.